Within a week Bishop’s machine had been recovered entirely whole, flown back to the field, and the pilot himself had recuperated. But he freely admitted to me in Salt Lake recently that if Ellis had not shown exceptional courage and excellent flying judgment, he, Bishop, would have perished almost within sight of aid.
These are tales of Bishop, Ellis, Blanchfield, Boonstra, Huking, and Vance.
Meager reports of other experiences are filed away, usually on single sheets of paper, in the office of the Superintendent of the Air Mail Service. For, with an Air Mail pilot, modesty amounts to an obsession. Those with whom I am acquainted would be the first to deny that flying is a dangerous game. Haven’t they been flying “crates” and “coffins” for ten years? Nevertheless, every day these pilots take grave risks, and in time of storm they undergo hazards comparable only to those which aviators at the front underwent during the war. For the pilot, once in the air, has nothing between the earth and himself but his Liberty motor.
It is over this sort of country—wooded and treacherous—that the Air Mail pilots fly.
What sort of men are these sky-riders? They are a quiet, modest, efficient, hardy, intrepid, expert, and likeable group of young men. Many of them are in the Army Air Service Reserve. Most of them received their training before or during the war. They fly every day in the year, in darkness and fog, through snow, hail, “twisters,” lightning, sleet, and rain. The dangers of flying they accept as a matter of course. Even forced landings such as I have described, in a rocky and uninhabited country, are smilingly accepted as part of the day’s work. They fly at great altitudes, barely skimming the backbone of the continent. On every side they see only dense forests, turbulent streams, jagged peaks, and precipitous canyon walls. Yet they continue on, day after day, year after year.
These pathfinders of the West have reduced the United States, in terms of transportation, to one-fourth its size. One can appreciate the value of the service they render only if he realizes that the prosperity of the United States depends mainly on doing business with ourselves on a bigger scale, and that business is carried on chiefly by correspondence. And no branch of the Post Office Department takes greater pride than the Air Mail Service in the motto from Herodotus that is carved above the portal of the New York Post Office:
“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the July 1925 issue of McClure’s Magazine. The cover image was created by the transcriber and placed in the public domain.